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www.shamansociety.org 35 Please join us for a Book Part Reading by Katrinka Moore Guillermo Filice Castro Music performed by Catherine Graetze ... Numa calls concocts her self each cell burns gathers rind and bone she calls corrals becomes begins again 3 After all that the unexpected ending to the story when an interloper appears in the forest could not in retrospect have been any different. It was the after effect of the poem however that brought the real surprise for me. It came after I had finished the book late one night and went to bed. I had an intensely unsettling dream where suddenly and frighteningly I found that I was conscious and was making ear-piercing high-pitched sounds that I couldnt control or understand. And I was aware that I no longer knew who I was or where I was going. It was terrifying. I realized later that I had in a sense been suspended between ceasing to be me and becoming another. I had been trapped in the gearsthe very intersticesof reality where dangerously I was stuck making the foreign sounds of another creature I was not able even to identify but without the intention of becoming any- thing. For what seemed like a long time I struggled to cease making those more-and-more-ear-splitting sounds of desperation and to exit from the dream. And when I finally did manage to awaken I realized that I had just had a lesson in what not to do when shape-shifting. Just as important as knowing what you want to shape-shift into I realized was knowing how to come back to your original shape so as not to get trapped in between. As I saw it I hadnt taken with me any tools for navigating for directing the experience. I knew then with certainty that indeed to write such a powerful poem about shape-shifting Moore had to have had the experience herself at least on the ener- getic level. I knew that Moore had been a Butoh dancer with a Japanese company where dancers moved so slowly that the movement was almost imperceptible and it might take an hour to move across the stage. But now I learned in an exchange with Moore that she had also studied with anthropologist Felicitas Goodman author of Where Spirits Ride the Wind who explored posture- mediated trance based on prehistoric cave paintings and indigenous artifacts that often portrayed metamorphosis or shape-shifting. And yes Moore explained that she had had some powerful experiences which were reflected in Numa. Endnote 1 Shifts p. 15. 2 Meander p. 59. 3 Rises p. 69.